Prologue
Quinault Indian Nation, Washington State, Pacific Coast
Present Day
THE PISTOL IN Chris Walker’s hand felt heavier than he remembered.
Combat altered the senses. Elevated them. It sharpened sight, amplified sound, magnified scent; ancient survival mechanisms etched into the human genome. But that was the kinetic kind. In that type of fight, muscles moved before the mind caught up.
This was a different battle, one that required thought. And with that thought came the weight.
Sitting on the rear built-in sofa of his customized ’84 Volkswagen Westfalia Vanagon, parked on a bluff in the rain overlooking the rough waters of the Pacific, Walker pressed the cold steel of the 1911’s barrel to his temple.
This was the edge of the abyss, and Walker’s senses were in hyperdrive.
The round Navy Chelsea clock bolted above the bookshelf ticked with surgical precision.
He had salvaged it during a wreck dive off Algeria with a few buddies from his first SEAL platoon and had it restored by a Swiss watchmaker who had once repaired timepieces for submariners.
Now it clacked like a metronome. A steady drip from the cedar bough over the van’s roof snapped like a snare drum.
Rain lashed the side windows in gusts, the hiss of cymbals in a storm-born symphony.
Beneath it all, the ocean’s bass drum rolled, deep, patient, eternal.
If he weren’t about to end his life, Walker might have tapped his foot to it.
He had always felt alive when listening to the crashing waves, howling wind, and torrential rain of the Pacific Northwest, preferring it to the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He shifted the pistol from the side of his head and repositioned it under his chin.
If he was going to take his life, it was going to be with a 1911 and not the Austrian-made Glock he had carried across continents, through wars, and into the shadows as a paramilitary officer in the CIA’s Ground Branch.
Afghanistan was where he had failed, and now it was time to join the friend he was responsible for putting in the grave.
He imagined the bullet going through the roof of his mouth and tearing through his brain, perhaps embedding itself in the thin mattress of the pop-top.
Walker wanted the shot to blend into the natural symphony, one more beat in time.
He could hear it all now, the waves, the rain, the staccato drip from the cedar bough.
Thunder.
It didn’t roll in. It crashed, abrupt and graceless, like a mortar round landing too close. It shattered the rhythm, tore through the fragile harmony of the forest like shrapnel.
Then it passed.
Walker exhaled. He lowered the pistol to his lap, waiting for the rhythm to return.
It was important that he die in the proper rhythm.
A flip phone sat open on the table in front of him. He reached for it with his left hand, his thumb hovering over the power button, waiting for the right moment.
The wind rocked his home on wheels, the rain pounded harder.
Walker looked up at the headliner of the old Vanagon, marveling at how the pop-top camper wasn’t leaking.
Having served in tropical hellholes and frozen wastelands, crossed squalling seas and spiny mountain ridges, he had never heard precipitation like this.
Enough.
His thumb stabbed the phone’s power button. He closed his eyes and pressed the phone to his ear, waiting for it to find a signal.
Then came the bark, sharp, guttural, urgent. Paladin.
Walker opened his eyes. Thunder cracked again. Paladin, his Belgian Malinois, a veteran of countless explosive door breaches and firefights, was going berserk. The dog howled, snarled, and clawed at the door, defying all his training. He had never done that before.
Damn it.
Not only was the rhythm off now, but Walker couldn’t stop thinking of Paladin. It was bad enough to leave the dog outside, even if he was protected by the awning.
Fuck.
He swiveled the Vanagon’s compact table aside and got to his feet, leaving the open phone on the cushion, powered up, and placed the pistol on the cutting board that covered the sink in the port-side galley kitchen.
He would calm Paladin, say one more goodbye, then make the call and finish what he started.
His beard hid an angular jaw. It was highlighted with hints of gold that differentiated it from his greasy blond hair.
An ex-girlfriend and undergraduate creative writing major at NYU had once told him that his hair was the color of wheat and that his eyes reminded her of a cloudless summer afternoon. She had gone on to write poetry.
Walker wasn’t a tall man. People called him rangy because of his wiry build and the distant look in his eyes, the gaze that most said was a function of his former vocation, Navy SEAL turned CIA operator.
Yet those who knew him well, and there weren’t many, understood the look wasn’t about the fighting or the bad memories.
It was about the way he thought, the perception of his surroundings and his place within it, even more than that, mankind’s place within it.
Half of Chris Walker’s soul was that of a philosopher, a soul that seemed in constant conflict with its other half, that of a warrior.
That battle had run its course. Both sides were exhausted.
Walker would finish the clash with a single bullet to his head.
He bent his knees and twisted the handle on the sliding side door of the Syncro four-wheel drive Vanagon. He ducked and stepped outside.
Under the crack of thunder and the strobe of lightning, Paladin lunged from the shadows, forcing Walker into a seated position on the step outside. The dog’s breath was frantic, his tongue desperate, licking at Walker’s face like he was trying to pull a man from a coma.
Walker didn’t resist. He let the dog’s panic wash over him, grounding him. Barely sheltered by a fabric awning, he stroked Paladin’s head with a trembling hand, fingers brushing the scars behind the ears.
Beyond the edge of the canopy, the rain didn’t fall so much as collapse; vertical surf pounding the earth, retreating, then crashing again.
The forest swayed under it, cedar limbs writhing like the arms of monsters.
No wonder Paladin was losing it. Out here, the world looked like it was coming undone.
And maybe it was.
Walker dropped to a knee on the patch of AstroTurf under the awning, the soaked green square squelching beneath his weight, and tucked a strand of shoulder-length dirty blond hair behind his ear.
He leaned in close, forehead to fur, and thought of the commands taught to Paladin in his training, a combination of Dutch and German, a canine language of obedience, of control, of war.
“Nothing really covers this, Pal, does it?”
Despite all his canine combat training, Paladin wasn’t buying it.
The dog’s light brown eyes flickered. His breath came in ragged spurts.
Paladin had taken shrapnel to the neck during a raid in Kandahar, leaving a scarred hole in his windpipe.
When he panted, it sounded like a hacksaw cutting through a pipe.
“It’s all right now,” Walker soothed, pulling the dog close.
He shifted to the camp stool near the cooler and stroked Paladin’s head.
To the right of the door, firmly secured by black rigger’s tape, was an envelope in a Ziploc bag that read: “ATTN TOMMY HAWKEYE. INSTRUCTIONS AND MONEY FOR PALADIN’S CARE.
” Tommy was a Vietnam vet who lived with his wife not far away on the reservation. They would give Paladin a good home.
Walker had used his vintage Navy-surplus Royal Quiet De Luxe to hammer out the instructions. The typewriter, stowed in its olive-drab case, rested between freeze-dried food packets, Tupperware containers, and barbecue tools in the camper. Everything had its place in the van.
Those instructions included the commands the dog would understand, guidance for his exercise and food, and most importantly, the phone number of a fellow former SEAL in Southern California who ran a combat dog rehabilitation and rescue camp in case Hawkeye and his wife needed it.
More thunder. Paladin whined.
“Just take it easy, boy,” Walker said, staying with English as the dog licked his hands. Paladin would be okay. He wouldn’t be alone for long. Walker stood up to head back inside.
“Blijf,” he said halfway through the door, telling the dog to stay. “Baywaken,” he added, a command to guard the site. “Attaboy.”
He slammed the door shut and tried to block out Paladin’s growls.
Back in the van, he snagged the pistol off the cutting board and resumed his seat on the cushion. It was time. Just do it, he told himself. Like yanking a Band-Aid.
A headshot would take care of the memories. Of Afghanistan. Of John Staub.
Walker checked the ship’s clock and retrieved the phone, which blinked with a flashing light that he ignored. His right hand held the .45-caliber pistol, his left the phone. He stabbed the preprogrammed number for the tribal cops with his thumb.
One shot at this, he said to himself, pausing for a second to appreciate the double meaning.
As he waited on the tribal police dispatcher to pick up, he surveyed the interior of his van, eyes passing over his books, tomes from NYU and a few others he had picked up since abandoning his postgraduate education, a collection of philosophers: Plato, Voltaire, Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer.
Next to these great teachers of the West, he had arranged texts on the Eastern faiths and philosophies: Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism, Buddhism.
I guess I’m finally going to see which of you guys was right.
Above the books were other letters for the authorities, more envelopes taped to the cabinet doors, one for the wife of a long-gone friend.
His eyes lingered on his guitar, the instrument he played only for himself. He would miss it.
“Quinault Nation Tribal Police,” a female voice answered.
“Hello,” Walker said. “I’m calling from the Lower Quinault River, close to the estuary. I need to report a dead body.”
“A dead body? We’ll get someone right out. Do you have any idea as to the identity of the individual, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
Walker snapped the phone shut, set it down, and lifted his pistol. He pressed it to the underside of his chin, pushed down on the thumb safety, and set his finger on the trigger. The doctors had said his head was broken. They were right.
Outside, amid the swishing branches and crashing skies, Paladin howled as had his ancestors, wolves that had once hunted these very lands.
Walker closed his eyes, telling himself it was a fitting send-off. Paladin had seen a lot of death. He would understand. Time to…
Bleep-bleep.
Walker removed his finger from the trigger. What the hell was that? An irritating little sound that did not blend with the natural rhythms of the storm.
My death has to be in rhythm.
He glanced at the phone and saw a flashing light.
Fuck it. Doesn’t matter. Do it, Chris.
Bleep-bleep.
He closed his eyes tighter than before, willing the unnatural sound away, sliding his finger back into place on the trigger.
Ignore it and press.
Do it!
Bleep-bleep.
His heart was racing.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Arrhythmic.
Bleep-bleep.
Fuck!
Walker engaged the thumb safety and lowered the gun to his lap, sucking in deep breaths, the religion and philosophy texts on his shelf coming back into focus. The sound was a text indicator and a message was on the phone’s outer LCD screen.
Hey Chris, it’s Leigh Ann Staub. Hope you’re well. I’ve been calling you but not getting an answer. Trying this—hope it works. Please call me back as soon as you can. It’s important.
Walker stared at it in disbelief.
A message from Leigh Ann just as he was about to join her husband in Valhalla?
What kind of timing was that?
He looked back to the books.
John Staub, his master chief in the SEAL Teams whom he had followed into Ground Branch, was dead because of Walker. Now his wife just spared Walker’s life?
He fought to control his breathing as Paladin’s howls took on a pain he had not noticed before.
You trying to talk me out of this, buddy?
Thunder rumbled, more distant than it had been moments earlier.
Was the storm passing?
Walker tilted his head to look out the side window and up into the dark clouds, his inner philosopher kicking into gear, questioning the workings of the universe, the unity of nature, thought, and consciousness.
His mind flashed over Spinoza, who wrote that there was no good or evil, just substance and elements; even thoughts were elements.
He looked down at the pistol resting in his hand on his right leg, then up to an envelope taped just below his books. Earlier in the day he had written on it in Sharpie: “LEIGH ANN STAUB, NEW ORLEANS.”
Substance and elements. What the hell was going on?
Tired of you, inner philosopher.
The destruction, the loss, the injustice—those were his substance and elements, and they demanded atonement. Dignity. Finality.
He could not quell the question.
Leigh Ann Staub? Now?
He saw John’s lifeless body in the Afghan dirt, then alive and laughing in the CIA bar of Kabul’s Arania Hotel, a Kipling quote written on the wall behind him:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
The sound that tore from Walker wasn’t a scream, it was a rupture. A raw, guttural cry, the pain of a soul ripped from its body.
Walker raised the 1911, pushed down on the thumb safety, and pressed the trigger.